


The Way the World Ends 1

by Thimblerig



Series: The Lion and the Serpent [26]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: A Wild Plot Appears, Gen, Imperfect knowledge of Catholic minutiae, The horror of the early morning and the early morning person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-15 00:30:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7197986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“Well, maybe it isn't a place,” Aramis said at last. </em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way the World Ends 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for the wait.

Madrid was beautiful in the early morning, when the mellifluous light of the late summer sun slanted delicately over the gables of the high roofs. There were few chickens kept in the city walls, but Aramis crowed enough for any rooster.

“‘No more freebies,’ you said. ‘Do they put beans on the table?’ you asked. ‘How do your “ridiculous” stunts do anything but put us at risk,’ you demanded. Ha!”

Madame, absent her morning coffee, answered only with a snarl and very white teeth. She sat up out of her tumbled quilts and tugged the folds of her dishevelled night shift up over her shoulder. Her tangles of hair hung over her as well as any shawl. “We aren't adopting your latest pity project,” she said flatly, eyes green as sour gooseberries.

“Pff,” he waved a hand. “His lordship left half an hour ago. But what he left behind...”

He tossed a roll of papers onto her gilt-edged nightstand.

“I give you… San Sebastian.”

“What is it, then?”

“I've no idea. But the day is young!”

Madame snarled and flopped back on her pillow.

+++ 

Hours later the scent of burned coffee hung heavy in the air. Aramis raked brusque fingers through his hair. Behind him, Madame paced back and forth, steps sharp and irritable.

“Seven ships and seven ports,” she said again. “Smuggling?”

_ “Into _ France? All at once?” He tutted. “If they hadn't already left we could have a look-see… if we left now we could catch one on arrival…?”

“Too late to do anything useful, no doubt,” she snapped. “If it were not a decoy. Does Le Havre have a San Sebastian church? Marseille?”

“It's a popular sort of churchy name,” Aramis answered gloomily. “Well, maybe ‘San Sebastian’ isn't a place,” he said at last.

Madame sighed gustily and leaned over his shoulder, one hand on the back of his chair. “What then?”

“Maybe it’s more allegorical.” Aramis rifled through the pile of books they'd been using for their latest… endeavour... and found a hagiography, paging through it until he found the saint in question, illustrated by a man bound to a post with his wrists dragged high, his muscles taut and his beautiful face contorted with the agony of the arrows that pierced him.

Madame ticked her thumb against the man’s lovingly detailed torso. “And what does he mean, then?”

“You worked for your ecclesiastical gentleman for how many years, exactly?”

“I was more practice than theory.”

Aramis rubbed the back of his neck. “He was a Roman soldier who preached the faith, and was sentenced to death by arrows, pierced like a sea-urchin the story goes, but he lived. He’s a saint that soldiers pray to. That's one thing it might mean. The fascination of Renaissance artists with the nude male form.” Madame smirked. “A testament to a man's ability to survive unbelievable injury, and pain, only to push his luck and die again, body discarded in a sewer.” He smiled himself, crookedly.

_ “Ha, I know that one,”  _ said Kitty, coming in with a blackened kettle.  _ “When the family I travelled with got sick, they hung tags of him all about. Saint Sebastian.” _

“Yes,” answered Aramis distractedly. He moved aside and let her pour steaming water into a crockery pot and the aromatic herbs it contained. A powerful scent of rosemary rose up and he smiled. “Thank you, Kitty.”

_ “But that's what he's for,” _ she insisted. She grabbed his hand with her little one and, as he stared, startled, rapped it on the picture of the saint and then touched it to the little dents left by smallpox on her temple. His eyes softened, and he touched her in almost a caress.

When he pulled away, he put his finger on one of the arrows that pierced the saint in such exquisite agony. “‘With a face as dark as night,’” he translated from the Greek, “‘and his silver bow rang death as he shot his arrow in the midst of them…’”

“And that means?” snapped Madame, irritably.

“Sebastian is the patron saint of plague.”

**Author's Note:**

> If Milady were asked to describe Aramis, and felt like answering honestly, she'd start with ‘efficient killer’, move through things like ‘twisty’ and ‘dangerously romantic’, and definitely end with ‘completely and utterly insufferable in the mornings’.
> 
> The lines quoted near the end are from Homer’s Iliad, actually referencing the god Apollo, whose portfolio included the sun, archery, and plague. The shared arrow motif is probably why Saint Sebastian picked up plague himself.
> 
> Ah... since deliberately spreading disease is a spectacularly shitty thing to do, I'm just going to make clear that I have no reason to believe either side of the Franco-Spanish War tried this. I wrote it because I needed something villainous to fight against. 
> 
> Also, there was a lot of plague around, that decade.


End file.
